


5 Times Tony Didn’t Need To Worry About Peter

by grilledcheesing



Category: Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-11-30 16:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11467308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grilledcheesing/pseuds/grilledcheesing
Summary: ... and one time he certainly did.SPOILERS for Spiderman: Homecoming.





	1. one

**(One)**

 

Tony is halfway across the world and enjoying a rum and coke alone in his hotel room at the end of a long day when the device on his wrist buzzes, and not the good kind of buzz — the Someone Got Into Shit They Weren’t Supposed To buzz. Before Tony can even open his mouth to address F.R.I.D.A.Y., the device is glowing red.

 

Shit. The kid.

 

“Pull up Spider-Man’s vitals.”

 

F.R.I.D.A.Y. immediately projects a visual — temperature (higher than most, but normal for Peter), respiratory rate (slow), blood pressure (ridiculously low), pulse — 

 

Two beats per minute.

 

Tony blinks, certain he is reading it wrong, but there it is in angry, pulsing text.

 

“Deploy a medical drone to the Parker residence,” he says, his back ramrod straight and his heart in his throat. He knows F.R.I.D.A.Y. is on it, but he grits his teeth and adds anyway, _“Now_.”

 

One minute. Less than. Tony stands up from the bed and paces the room, F.R.I.D.A.Y. projecting the live feed of the drone’s visual as the thoughts race through his head — how the _hell_ did this happen? Why didn’t any of the suit’s protocols warn him that Peter had been injured before it got this bad?

 

Thirty seconds. _Fuck_. Time seems to slow to a crawl as the drone weaves its way into Queens, as Tony manages to imagine every horrific, inhumane, terrible thing that has happened to Peter while he was stupid enough not to check in on him for the last few hours, knowing all too well that trouble found Peter faster than Peter could blink — 

 

Finally, _finally_ the drone makes it to Peter’s, where the window is wide open, the way Tony both knew and feared it would be. He pieces together the scene before he even has a full visual — Peter arriving blood-soaked and battered, pitching himself in through the window, collapsing in a heap on the floor where nobody would think to — 

 

Tony blinks, taking a breath for the first time since the drone was deployed. The visual shows Peter, maskless but otherwise still in his suit, strewn out across his bed and snoring. Other than the black eye he’s sporting, he looks perfectly fine.

 

“Standing by,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. reports.

 

Tony squints, wondering if he is imagining the steady rising and falling of Peter’s chest. It perfectly matches the respiratory rate on his vitals. But that still doesn’t explain why …

 

“F.R.I.D.A.Y., why the hell is his heart rate so low?”

 

“A slow heart rate is typical of people with enhanced abilities at the peak of their REM cycles,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. reports.

 

Tony closes his eyes, pinching them with his thumbs as if he can ward off the migraine he knows is going to keep him up all night now.

 

“And this is the first time Peter’s fallen asleep in the suit,” he mutters. He stumbles back toward the bed, easing himself onto the edge of it, his own heart beating like a battering ram and more than making up for Peter’s. “ _Christ_.”

 

He grabs his rum and coke and downs the rest of it, seeing Peter shift on the visual out of the corner of his eyes. One of the kid’s eyes squints open, and then the other, blearily taking in the noiseless drone still hovering a foot from his bed.

 

“...’lo?” he addresses it.

 

Tony sighs. “Just me, kid.”

 

Peter’s eyes shut and then half-open again. “...’m I dreaming?”

 

“Sure are,” he says. “Go back to bed.”

 

Peter’s eyes close again. “Alright,” he breathes out.

 

Tony watches for another minute or so, until he’s sure that Peter really is asleep. He breathes out a breath wearier than he thought he was capable of, surveying the kid’s pale face, the ring of bruising around his eye that has made some progress in healing even in the few minutes the done has been hovering there. He wonders if it will always be like this — the fear, the anxiety, the complete and utter helplessness.

 

He gets up from the bed, feeling like he just aged ten years. He’s gonna need another drink.


	2. two

**(two)**

 

Tony has Google Alerts set up for every member (and semi-member, and ex-member, and possible war criminal) of the Avengers, but he only checks his feed two or three times a day. The articles with the most hits float right to the top of it, so he knows to stop looking when he scrolls down to things as irrelevant as “HOW TO COSPLAY HAWKEYE” or “Did Captain America Eat His TWIN IN THE WOMB??”

 

The night of Halloween, however, Tony doesn’t even have a chance to scroll before the first headline momentarily stops his heart: _Spider-Man Plummets To Death Off Midtown Fire Escape._

 

He clicks into the article, already primed to have stern words aimed at whatever media establishment thought it was acceptable to use this sick clickbait for views, but there are photos — photos of what definitely looks like Spider-Man prostrate on the cement in a pool of his own blood.

 

Tony clicks out of the article. He may be prone to worry (honestly, if he doesn’t get a Peter Parker-related ulcer before the year is out, it’ll be a goddamn feat of biology), but he’s also not an idiot — it’s Halloween. The statistical probability that it was some jackass _dressed_ as Spider-Man that got drunk and fell off a fire escape is pretty damn high.

 

He taps into Spider-Man’s vitals and nothing pops up on the screen; again, Tony thinks, he probably isn’t wearing the suit. And yes, sure, the screen would be similarly blank if he _was_ wearing the suit and happened to be a pile of organs on the sidewalk, but that doesn’t mean that —

 

“For the love of god,” he mutters. He’s not going to be able to sleep tonight unless he sees the kid with his own eyeballs.

 

“F.R.I.D.A.Y., I need Peter Parker’s current location.”

 

F.R.I.D.A.Y. pulls up the data from the tracking device in the kid’s phone. “Peter Parker is currently one quarter of a mile away, on 51st between 10th and 11th street,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. reports, showing a green flickering dot that is a mere block away from the news reports of the dead Spidey.

 

“Fucking Christ,” Tony mutters. Motivated by either horror or irritation, he immediately leaves the tower, utterly convinced everywhere in his body except for his hammering heart that it is _not Peter who fell from that fire escape_. For one thing, Peter can survive a fall of that magnitude easily — Tony’s seen it with his own eyes. And if it were a fall any higher than one Peter could survive, the parachute would deploy in an instant.

 

Unless the parachute hadn’t been replaced. Something Peter wouldn’t know or think to do on his own. Tony has him stop by the tower every two weeks or so for fine-tuning, but didn’t he have some calc test to study for last week?

 

No. _Nope._ He is not doing this to himself again. It’s not Peter. It’s not Peter. It’s not — 

 

“Mr. Stark?”

 

He’s never been more relieved to hear a nervous post-pubescent voice crack in his entire life. He turns around mid-stride on 51st to face none other than Peter himself, surrounded by his usual ragtag gang of friends, who are all looking at Tony like he is a hallucination.

 

“Oh, kid,” says Tony, blowing out a breath as he looks him up and down.  “This is a massive disappointment.”

 

“It’s not alcohol,” says Peter, shoving his water bottle full of some bright pink substance under Tony’s nose, his eyebrows furrowed in such earnest concern that all of Tony’s lingering upset with the bajillionth heart attack Peter just caused him dissolves.

 

“Get your juice out of my face, kid. I meant your kicks. That’s betrayal in its highest form.”

 

Peter reddens under the felt Captain America mask propped on his head. “It was, uh … I mean, I didn’t want Aunt May to waste any more money on costumes, and I …”

 

“No, no, I get it,” says Tony. “You like Cap better.”

 

“No! I mean — I …” Peter flounders.

 

“Shit, Parker wasn’t lying,” says a shorter boy with his hair gelled back, dressed like a rapper. “He _does_ know Tony Stark.”

 

“Maybe now you’ll stop calling him Penis Parker,” says a wry, scowling girl who doesn’t appear to be wearing any costume at all.

 

Before Tony can express any distaste for that, Peter gets his wits about him again and blurts, “I _had_ an Iron Man costume! Well, a mask. When I was a kid. But I outgrew it. And also my aunt said I wasn’t allowed to wear it anymore cuz I tried to fight bad guys with it when those drones took over Queens, so.”

 

Tony blinks, a memory coming back to him, sharp and almost unwelcome. A little boy standing like a tree rooted in the chaos, facing one of the drones without a trace of fear as it locked itself on him and prepared to shoot. If Tony had arrived a split second later than he did, he would have been dead.

 

_Nice work, kid._

 

He tries to meet Peter’s eye, but it’s hard when the kid suddenly looks more self-conscious than ever.

 

“Huh,” says Tony. Every time he thinks the weight of this responsibility is as heavy as it can get, the universe drops another bomb on him. “Anyway, I’m gonna need your phone, kid.”

 

Peter’s eyes widen. “What? Why?”

 

“Dude, Tony Stark just asked for your phone,” says the kid with the gelled hair. “ _Fork it over_.”

 

Ned, the only friend of Peter’s Tony knows the name of, rolls his eyes.

 

“Just need to make some minor adjustments to all the interns’ phones, and since you’re here, well, might as well get a headstart.”

 

Tony holds his hand out expectantly. Peter must know there is some amount of bullshit to what’s happening, and for a moment it punctures Tony in that same unexpected place that Peter just trusts him enough to hand it over anyway, the way he’s trusted Tony right from the start.

 

“Thanks,” says Peter warily.

 

Tony nods and pockets it. The truth is, he doesn’t want the kid looking at his phone tonight and seeing the news report himself. The body’s long off this block by now, but that headline is going to be screaming off newsfeeds for the next 48 hours at least. He already knows the kid well enough to know he’s going to hold himself responsible.

 

And he’ll deal with that in the morning, when Peter inevitably sees it. The very least Tony can do is make sure he doesn’t see it tonight, the one time Tony’s actually seen him walking around town and acting like a _kid_.

 

Tony straightens up and says, “You guys need me to buy you some beers before I go, or …”

 

Peter opens his mouth and all that comes out is a splutter.

 

“Oh, jeez, kid, I was kidding.” He knocks the felt Captain America mask with his wrist. “Don’t go full Boy Scout on me. I’ll see you at HQ tomorrow.”

 

Peter blinks at him, and then realizes what’s happening — that Tony is shamelessly helping him show off in front of his friends, particularly the gelled up, gobsmacked one that looks like he might pass out at any moment. Peter’s face splits into a grin so genuine that he looks more like a kid to Tony than he ever has.

 

“Yeah, yeah, see you then, Mr. Stark.”

 

Tony salutes him and heads off, walking back much slower than he came. When he hears the chorus of _“Holy shit, Peter!_ ” and “ _That was Tony fucking Stark!_ ” that follow in his wake, he can’t help but smile, too.


	3. three

**(three)**

 

Tony is actually considering going to bed at a reasonable hour for once in his damn life when he is interrupted by an incoming call from May Parker. 

 

“I take it this isn’t a social call?” 

 

He hears May let out a nervous laugh that he recognizes the feeling behind all too well. “Sorry to bother, I’m sure you’re, uh, a busy man — “

 

“Never too busy for the Parker family.” 

 

“So he  _ is _ with you?” asks May hopefully. 

 

Tony closes his eyes for a moment, mentally preparing himself for whatever nonsense is about to follow in the next hour or so of his life. “Nope,” he says, already rerouting himself from the kitchen to his office. “How long has he been out?” 

 

May hesitates for a moment. “Well, he had robotics club after school, and then he said he was hanging out with friends, and … well, it’s almost 10 o’clock and he hasn’t texted in … six hours?” 

 

It’s gotten to the point where Tony doesn’t even have to tell F.R.I.D.A.Y. to pull up Peter’s location or his stats — he literally just has to jerk his head a certain way for all the information to project itself in front of him. 

 

“Doesn’t look like he’s patrolling,” says Tony, when the suit fails to give him any vitals and a quick scan of social media doesn’t have any fresh images of baby-faced webslingers flying around the city. 

 

May blows out a breath. “Well, that’s good, right?” she says. “Sorry. Sorry, I just — I always imagine the worst.” 

 

_ I know the feeling _ , Tony almost says. But he doesn’t want to give May any more reasons to worry than she already has. And judging by the shape Tony and the other Avengers brought Peter back to her in after that little run-in they had with a friend of Thor’s last week, he knows she has plenty. 

 

“I’m sure he’ll text soon.” 

 

“Well, his phone’s dead, so probably not,” says Tony, as F.R.I.D.A.Y. starts offering more information. “Last location it picked up was back at his school.” 

 

“How do you — “ May cuts herself off, and he can almost hear the rueful smile on the other end of the phone. “Of course.” 

 

“Listen, I’m sure he’s just … being a teenager,” says Tony, even as he swallows down his own doubts. 

 

“Maybe. Probably,” says May. He can tell she’s lying for his benefit, too. “Will you, uh — “

 

“If I hear from him, you’ll be the first to know,” Tony assures her. He almost asks her to do the same, but it feels like overstepping. That is, if sticking a tracker on the kid’s phone and suit wasn’t enough of an overstep already. 

 

May thanks him again and hangs up. Tony waits all of two seconds before letting out a sigh and saying, “F.R.I.D.A.Y., engage facial recognition program in Manhattan and surrounding boroughs.”  

 

“Subject?” 

 

“Peter Parker.” 

 

If he didn’t know any better, he’d almost call the few seconds of silence after F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s execution of the command judgmental. 

 

He’s surprised by how fast the program finds Peter — partially because it’s one of the first times Tony has used it since it was developed, but mostly because he was, despite everything, half-expecting that the kid actually  _ was _ in the suit, and had rationalized some ridiculous and undoubtedly dangerous new reason for overriding Tony’s programming of it. 

 

The image pans out, and Tony sees that Peter is not alone. He’s outside, sitting in the cold on a bench outside Central Park with the same girl he was with on Halloween, the one with the long hair and the slightly surly expression. On either side of them there are two coffee cups, hers in tact and his basically reduced to shreds, which is all the context Tony needs to know that Peter is apparently so smitten in pubescent love that he’s completely forgotten the rest of the world. 

 

“F.R.I.D.A.Y., provide external battery charge to Peter’s phone,” he says. And then to himself: “Hate to bust up the party.” 

 

As he waits for the phone to charge so he can chew Peter out, the camera from the street unexpectedly starts picking up audio. 

 

“... not even sure what I want to do yet, you know? I mean, my parents were  _ actors _ ," says the girl.  "My mom’s still pissed she didn’t get her little Broadway star out of my genetic makeup.” 

 

“No, no, I get it,” says Peter, nodding too fast, rapt with attention. “I mean … the expectations thing. I — I get it.” 

 

“Your aunt doesn’t seem the pressuring type.” 

 

“No, no, god, no, um …” 

 

Oh, Jesus. The kid can’t even get a word out without stammering. Tony is going to have to have a talk with him about this, at a more appropriate time when Peter hasn’t worried the bejeezus out of his aunt (and, okay, him). 

 

“I just mean that … what I’m trying to say is … well, they’re lucky. Your parents. You’re, um — you’re really cool.” 

 

The girl smirks at him. “Cool, huh?” She’s busting him a bit, but she leans forward anyway. 

 

“I just mean — like, smart, and funny, and — and honest, and — ”

 

“Phone battery externally charged,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. reports. 

 

Tony clears his throat. “Call Peter Parker.” 

 

Tony doesn’t  _ mean _ for his timing to be so terrible — okay, maybe he does, but Peter kind of deserves it — but the girl and Peter separate so fast at the sound of Peter’s phone blaring in full volume that they nearly butt heads. He can tell the kid knows it’s him, both because he set his personal ringtone to an AC/DC song, and because even from the grainy street camera he can see Peter’s face go slack with panic. 

 

“Shit,” says Peter, “I have to get this, um — ”

 

“Does your caller ID say — ?”

 

“Hello?” 

 

“Hey, Peter,” says Tony, his jaw tight. “Nice night. Did you maybe forget to call a certain aunt of yours and inform her that you’d be late getting home?” 

 

“Oh,  _ shi _ — shoot. What time is — ”

 

“Time to start taking some responsibility for your actions,” says Tony sternly, “and having some  _ respect _ for the people who care about you.” 

 

Shit. He didn’t actually mean to come down that hard. Also, that is the most undeniably  _ lame dad _ thing a person could possibly say; he can’t decide if he just turned into his own father or Captain fucking America himself. 

 

What’s worse is that he knows Peter doesn’t deserve it. He so rarely slips up, and all the times they’ve had to pull him into shit going down in the city certainly isn’t helping matters. For a kid who asked not to be a part of the Avengers yet, Tony admittedly hasn’t done the greatest job of giving him that space. It’s a wonder when Peter even gets to have an experience as normal as missing curfew at all.

But before he can say anything to right the weird imbalance he's created, Peter is back to stammering into the phone. 

 

“You’re right,” says Peter. “Oh, Jesus. Fu ...  I mean — I’m gonna go. I’m sorry, I just lost track of time, I really am — ”

 

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to your aunt,” he says gruffly. 

 

Peter pulls the phone away from his ear, looking utterly mortified. The sound cuts out then, but not before he hears the girl’s voice as clear as a bell: “Uh, did we just get cockblocked by Tony Stark?”  

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys, I am BLOWN away by your responses. Thank you so much. I actually am returning to this fandom (but this time on the Archive instead of FFN) and it's been YEARS so it is filling me with all kind of nostalgia and love and feels to hear from y'all. 
> 
> Sorry this chapter was less exciting, BUT I promise it builds up to a better/more dramatic one? We needed them to do a LOL at least once.


	4. four

Tony doesn’t hear from Peter for a few weeks after that — well, that is to say, Happy doesn’t hear from Peter, and doesn’t have anything to report. When Tony tells Happy to send a text every few days to at least prompt a response out of him, Peter obligingly sends one back, usually in the form of emojis that Tony honestly cannot decipher in sequence as anything meaningful.

 

But the kid keeps busy. There isn’t a single night in those few weeks that Tony doesn’t see some report of Spider-Man stopping a car chase or diffusing a bank robbery or returning a lost teddy bear from an elementary school field trip to its owner (Jesus, the adorable PR this kid gets in 15 minutes generates more goodwill and retweets than Tony got in 15 years). Nearly every moment that isn’t between the hours of 7:45am and 2:45pm, Peter seems to be on the streets.

 

He wonders if it’s partially because Peter feels guilty about the whole missing curfew thing. He figures he’ll patch things up on the third Tuesday of the month, which is when Peter is slated to come in for any updates or fixes to his suit; Tony isn’t usually there for that, but he figures he’ll make an exception this time, just to clear the air a bit. Try to tell the kid not to overstretch himself without lecturing. Try to tell the kid to use words less vague than “cool” to describe a girl he has a crush on without seeming like a creep.

 

Tuesday rolls around, and F.R.I.D.A.Y. never interrupts Tony in the lab to tell him Peter has arrived. Tony isn’t exactly surprised — Peter isn’t known for his promptness — but after an hour or so passes, he can’t help but feel that same itch of irritation and anxiety, never knowing whether the kid is being a stupid teenager or being a stupid teenager who got trapped in a metaphorical ditch.

 

Tony taps into the intercom. “What’s the holdup, Happy?”

 

“Not sure, boss. Kid said he’d be here yesterday.”

 

The irritation oscillates firmly into worry territory. Tony glances outside the window, where it’s been snowing heavily for the past few hours. He jerks his head, and F.R.I.D.A.Y. pulls up a display.

 

It isn’t a display Tony’s ever seen come from Peter’s suit before — it’s blank of any vitals, the way it is when he doesn’t have the suit on, but rather than appearing in gray, the whole thing is lit up in red.

 

“Activate Baby Monitor protocol.”

 

“Timeframe?”

 

“Last hour.”

 

“There is no record of the last hour.”

 

Tony purses his lips. “Find the most recent recording.”

 

The time stamp is from an hour and thirty minutes ago. Even for someone who travels the world in a giant flying robotic suit, he manages to get slight vertigo watching Peter in action through the camera on his mask — the low dips and sharp turns and unexpected shifts. This time he appears to be flying in and out somewhere in midtown.

 

“What do you think, Karen? Pizza or Thai tonight?” Tony can hear Peter saying. It’s already snowing heavily in the frame; Peter must have been on his way to the tower.

 

“I believe your Aunt May said this morning she was planning on cooking dinner,” responds the AI that Tony implanted in Peter’s suit.  

 

Peter laughs. “Why do you think I’m asking?”

 

Tony knows something is going to happen in this footage soon, because it only goes another 30 seconds. He’s already bracing himself when Peter’s prattling abruptly stops.

 

“I mean, pizza’s cheaper, but leftovers from Thai can last all — ohhhh, that’s a gun.”

 

Tony’s chest is already tight. The suit can stop a lot of things, but it can’t stop bullets.

 

“Hey!” he hears Peter call. “Dude with the gun!”

 

Tony watches through the baby monitor lens as Peter’s view frame shifts down below, to a man who is evidently mugging another man. They both look up just as Peter slings a biocable out, snatching the gun in an instant — only to have the guy pull out yet another gun from his pocket and start shooting.

 

“ _Dude_ ,” says Peter, dodging it easily, “have, like, a  _modicum_  of chill — ”

 

He slings another web at this gun, too — and then the footage starts to get shaky. Peter evidently slings another web up that either misses or doesn’t stick —  _the snow_ , Tony realizes, already furious with himself for not anticipating this — and then slings a few more, rapid-fire.

 

“Ohhh, shit. Shit shit shit — Karen, why can’t I — ”

 

“The northeastern side of the building appears to be less slick,” she answers immediately.

 

“Okay, I’ll, uh, get right on that — right after — this tool — stops  _shooting_  from it — ”

 

Another shot rings out. Tony’s already on his feet before Peter lets out a little yelp of surprise, pivoting and narrowly avoiding a hit, continuing to descend.

 

“Um, okay, northeastern side is out, maybe I can — ”

 

Tony already sees what’s going to happen a few seconds ahead of Peter’s panicked decision, when he slings a web that connects with a wire from a construction site. Sure enough, a moment after it connects, he hears Peter yelp again as the electric current hits him, and the baby monitor footage abruptly goes to black.

 

Somehow Tony’s feet already carried him to the open deck while he was watching without making a conscious decision to move. Another second later he’s fully suited up and flying into the snow, which is falling so thickly in front of him that he can barely see a few feet past his own face.

 

He arrives on the scene and checks the ground first, but there’s nothing but snow on snow on snow. Lucky for the guy who shot at Peter, he’s nowhere in sight — Tony is feeling particularly murderous right now, and it would no doubt have ended badly for him if he’d stuck around.

 

He tracks the surrounding ground with the heat-seeking mechanism in his suit, but for better or for worse, pulls up nothing. He flies a bit higher up, half-expecting to see a frozen, unconscious Spider-Man in the snow in a pool of his own blood, or worse.

 

Jesus. This is his fault. He yelled at the kid (again) and the kid doubled down to an absurd degree to prove himself ( _again_ ), and the whole miserable cycle is repeating itself, so much so that Tony feels like he is shaking his own father’s voice out of his ears as he ascends higher, scanning the street with half of his attention and starting to scan news reports for Spider-Man mentions with the other —  

 

“M-Mr. Stark!”

 

Tony rounds in the air to his immense relief to see a bright red speck of a person jumping up and down between his feet and waving with ridiculous, slightly manic enthusiasm from a nearby roof.

 

“H-hi, oh man, you wouldn’t  _believe_  what just happened, I got  _electrocuted_  and the whole suit sh-shut down and — “

 

“Yeah, hold still for a minute, kid,” says Tony, as he finally reaches him and starts assessing the damage.

 

“C-can’t do that, too c-cold,” says Peter apologetically, continuing to hop between his two feet in an effort to keep warm.

 

Tony reaches forward and pulls the mask off the kid’s head. Peter’s face is bloodless, his lips nearly blue and his pupils dilated way more than they should be, but looks so excited and relieved to see Tony that he seems entirely unaware of it. It’s clear from a quick glance up and down that at the very least he isn’t bleeding.

 

“Turn around, kid.”

 

Peter obeys, still half-hopping. “S-sorry you had to come get me, my biocables are fried, and I t-tried to crawl down after I woke up, but it was too slippery, and then I tried to y-yell across the street at the offices but nobody’s working today s-since it’s the day before Christmas Eve, so — oh, hey, how’d you do that?” he asks, just as Tony successfully reboots his suit using the chip in the back.

 

“Science,” says Tony wryly, flicking back on the heat feature.

 

Peter shudders. “Ahhh, thank you.”

 

He grabs Peter by the shoulders and turns him around again. He still hasn’t stopped shivering, so Tony has to grab his face to get a clear enough look at his eyes for the scanner. Peter can’t quite focus on him, his eyes wide, his balance swaying a bit between his feet.

 

Tony has one eye on Peter and the other on the readout. Elevated heart rate, muscular damage, mild concussion — a shock that no doubt would have killed anyone else in an instant, but Peter will likely recover from within a few hours. He’s just lucky he didn’t get a bullet in the back while it was happening.

 

Tony pulls up the face of his suit and Peter blinks at him in surprise.

 

“I never really know if it’s you or not,” he says, looking a little stricken.

 

“It’s always me, one way or the other,” says Tony.

 

Peter ducks his head down for a moment. “Sorry,” he says out of the side of his mouth, mistaking it for chastising.

 

Caught off guard, Tony opens his mouth to say something snarky to lighten the mood, but he suddenly doesn’t have the heart for it. “I’m just glad you’re alright,” he says instead, surprised by how easy it is to say. When Peter blinks up at him in that open, earnest way of his, he’s glad that he did.

 

Those same eyes go wide, though, when Tony abruptly reengages his suit, hovers off the ground, and grabs Peter under the arms.

 

“Wh-where are we going?”

 

“Back to the tower,” says Tony. By way of explanation, he says, “May will murder me if she sees you like this.”

 

“I’m fine!” Peter protests.

 

“Sure, kid.”

 

He isn’t, and proves just as much the moment they reach the ledge of the tower and Peter stumbles around like a drunk puppet the moment Tony eases him back onto solid ground. He rights himself in a few moments, looking sheepish and embarrassed as Tony’s suit folds back into itself.

 

“I’m good, I’m good,” says Peter, on the receiving end of a look Tony didn’t even realize he was making.

 

“Clearly,” says Tony. “Come on, kid — I’ll get to work on that suit.”

 

Tony follows him inside at arm’s length in case he topples over again. Within a few minutes Peter is decked out in a pair of Pepper’s sweatpants and a worn out Stark Industries t-shirt, which Peter mumbles in an unfocused way is still a step up from the Hello Kitty pajama pants from last time. (Tony has to admit, as funny as that was, it makes him feel like a shithead to remember it now.)

 

Tony sets him down on the couch in the main room and tells Happy to call May and tell her Peter’s spending the night. Peter protests again that he’s perfectly fine, but falls asleep two minutes after the opening credits to  _Star Wars: The Force Awakens_  and is virtually unwakeable for the next eight hours. Tony sits at a desk on the couch behind him and fiddles with the recipe Peter gave him for his biocables all night, until he’s certain none of them will ever slip off of an icy surface again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updating this one early, cuz I'm going to a work event alllll night. Thank you guys for your reviews. They bring me all the joy <3.


	5. five

Tony doesn’t mean to eavesdrop on Happy. He’s really just walking past to grab a snack before he makes his way back upstate when he hears the other man blustering through the hallway.

 

“Listen, I know you told your aunt you were staying home sick today, but I’m no idiot and I can still see you’re somewhere in Brooklyn,” says Happy. “Pick up the phone, or — ”

 

“Are you talking to Peter?”

 

Happy’s eyes snap up and lock on Tony’s.

 

“ — or … else,” Happy finishes lamely, hanging up the phone. He looks at Tony and says, “Yeah, but I’ve got it under control.”

 

“Got what under control, exactly?”

 

“Kid called out sick and is cutting class somewhere in Brooklyn,” says Happy, with that same this-really-isn’t-my-job, but-you’re-the-boss eyebrow raise that Tony has been on the receiving end of about seven thousand times since Tony plucked Peter out of Queens the first time. “He’s been in the same place all day. I was about to — ”

 

“Don’t worry about it,” says Tony. “I’m going on a stroll anyway.”

 

Happy opens his mouth to protest, but Tony shuts the door on him before he can. Then he calls Peter.

 

He knows something is wrong when the kid doesn’t pick up. He usually answers on the first ring, out of breath and overeager and running off at the mouth about whatever he’s up to that day or if there’s some way he can help.

 

“Hey, kid, it’s me. Cut the crap, we both know you mutants don’t get sick. What’s happening, huh? Call me back.”

 

He’s about to get the kid’s coordinates when a text comes in.  _everythings fine leaving in a sec._

 

Tony has approximately 99 reasons not to believe him based on that text alone, but the words do give him pause. He pulls up the Baby Monitor feed, and everything is black. For a split second he is furious — the kid clearly figured out a way to disable it again, and was up to God only knows what if he did — but then the screen shifts just slightly and Tony realizes that the footage isn’t cut off at all, but obscured. He can see just enough of a gap between two of Peter’s fingers to see that his hands are over his eyes.

 

He sighs. He hasn’t thought very much about the ridiculous pair goggles he found in Peter’s room since he put the kid in a suit of his own design, but it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together and guess he’s just plain old overwhelmed.

 

He decides at first to just leave the kid alone — he isn’t in any physical danger. Sure, he’s missing class, but Tony’s not about to become a 15-year-old kid’s hall monitor. Besides, if it were him, he rationalizes, he wouldn’t want anybody in his space. He wouldn’t want the embarrassment of being seen in whatever state prompted Peter to duck out on his own.

 

A few minutes pass. The thing is, it isn’t him. It’s a kid. It’s a scared, confused kid whose idea of properly handling sensory overload is to shove his hands over his eyes.

 

When he checks on Peter’s coordinates and sees that he still hasn’t budged, he heads down to the lab and, by sheer luck, manages to find a sensory deprivation helmet that Bruce was prototyping for himself before he fell off the face of the earth. Tony has no idea whether the thing actually works, but it’s better than nothing. He suits up and sets his course for Brooklyn, to the warehouse Peter is sitting in.

 

Incoming message:  _seriously its fine,_ it reads.

 

Tony ignores it. Another message comes right on its heels:  _i’ll leave in a min, you don’t have to come down here._

 

How the … ? Did the kid decide to give him a taste of his own medicine and start tracking him right back? Tony can’t decide if he’s furious or impressed. Honestly, the amount of subterfuge that would take in a security-heavy facility like the ones Tony resides in is kind of insane.

 

And then Tony realizes — Peter isn’t tracking him at all. Peter can  _hear him_. All the way from Brooklyn.

 

There’s a split second when Tony stops full throttle, wondering if he’s doing more harm than good by showing up. He can protect the kid from falling and electrocution and some of his own impulsive teenage tendencies, but he’s not exactly equipped to help with this. Or obligated, really.

 

It’s that last thought that makes him push forward again, lowering the thrusters on his suit a bit so at the very least it’s not as loud (not that they’re loud to begin with — what the hell kind of spider could bite a kid into this kind of insanity?).

 

He isn’t surprised when Peter’s location leads him to a warehouse on an all but empty street. He disengages the suit to walk inside, only enabling the thrusters to get himself up to the high corner where he sees the kid perched in the shadows, his hands now firmly planted over his ears and his eyes very clearly shut behind the mask.

 

He opens them when Tony gets up beside him. “Hey,” he says, in an attempt to sound casual that fails hard enough to make Happy’s attempt at a window garden look like a success. “What’s up?”

 

Tony nods at him. “You want to tell me about what this is?”

 

Peter hesitates for a moment. “Just, uh.” His voice is so quiet that it’s hard to hear him. “Most of the time I can … filter it. The noise. The color. But sometimes when I can’t focus …”

 

“Anything in particular giving you a hard time focusing right now?”

 

Peter shakes his head, then winces. “No.”

 

“Probably best to be straight with me,” says Tony, keeping his voice down to match volume with Peter.

 

Peter is quiet for a moment. “It’ll be fine in a few minutes,” he mumbles.

 

“Yeah, well, that’s what you said a few minutes ago.” Tony takes a seat beside Peter, slowly, like he might flinch or react in some unpredictable way. But Peter’s unnerving trust in Tony is as predictable as ever, and he lets him without saying a word. “We’re going to figure out a permanent solution to this, okay?”

 

“Hmm,” says Peter doubtfully, listlessly.

 

“This is not the permanent solution,” says Tony, pulling out the helmet, “but for right now, I think it’s the fastest one.”

 

Peter blinks at it briefly before shutting his eyes again.

 

“You okay to take the mask off for a second?”

 

It takes Peter a moment to nod, and another moment to start taking the mask off. He’s never seen the kid this pale. Judging by the rings under his eyes, this particular episode has been going on a lot longer than the past hour he’s been dodging Happy’s calls.

 

He’s reminded briefly of the way Peter looked up at him with complete and utter panic just before Tony pulled him out of the fight in Germany, in those brief seconds he was adjusting to the world again without the sensory deprivation of the eyes of his mask. Tony didn’t even think it might extend to his hearing, too. There are a whole host of questions right now he is kicking himself for never asking, when all the signs pointed right to them.

 

“How often does this happen?”

 

Peter shrugs. Even in the few seconds he’s had his mask off Tony can hear him struggling to catch his breath. His embarrassment is palpable, reddening in his face.

 

“Hey, it’s just me, kid,” says Tony, easing the helmet onto Peter’s head.

 

The effect is almost instantaneous. Peter lets out a long breath and his whole body slackens in relief. As he slouches into himself with an almost alarming speed, Tony reaches out and puts a hand around his shoulder to steady him. It occurs to him half a beat later that this might have the exact opposite of its intended effect and overwhelm the kid even more, but Peter seems so far outside himself that he leans into Tony’s side, sagging against him like the exhausted pile of teenage bones that he is.

 

Tony tries not to stiffen. He isn’t exactly sure how to do this — maybe his own father tried a few times, but Tony was so resistant to it from such a young age that he has no script to follow for the kind of support that someone actually accepts. But Peter doesn’t move so neither does Tony, listening to him breathe in and out, trying to get his bearings on where exactly they are.

 

The warehouse is empty, save for some boxes down below and Peter’s backpack, which is unzipped with things falling precariously out of it. His shirt, his jeans, a calculus textbook, a beaten-up notebook, a sandwich wrapper, a picture of — 

 

Tony squints at the picture, half-visible tucked between the pages of the notebook, and everything falls into a grim kind of sense. The picture is of a man Tony’s never seen, a man who can’t be much older than Tony is himself. The picture was taken on a boardwalk — Coney Island, Tony thinks — and the man appears to be grabbing the ice cream cone out of Peter’s hand right as the camera snapped, perfectly capturing the comical surprise on Peter’s face and the mischief in the man’s.

 

This must be the Peter’s uncle. The one he doesn’t talk about. It takes two seconds to for Tony to pull up an obituary that tells him what he already knows — that today is the year anniversary of his death.

 

“Thanks,” says Peter unexpectedly, his voice thick through the helmet.

 

Tony squeezes the kid’s shoulder with his hand. “Anytime.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #Bless all of you. I'm sad this is winding down so soon; alas, this format can't go on forever. That being said, I am taking requests if anyone has a particular story they want to read (mostly one-shots, but I'm open to multi-chapter ideas too). Obvi I'm here for the angst so hit me up, my humans. 
> 
> And thank you thank you thank you again for your comments. Makes the long work days go by HELLA faster. (TGIF, though, amiriiiiiiiite.)


	6. six

“You’re sending me to  _ camp? _ ” asks Peter, standing on the couch and pacing between the cushions in his apartment for no apparent reason when he takes Tony’s video call.

 

“It’s only a few hours a day,” says Tony, one eye on the video call and another on the mangled interface of some leftover alien weaponry from last month’s debacle in France. 

 

Peter is incredulous. “You’re sending me to  _ day  _ camp? I’m  _ sixteen _ .” 

 

“No, you’re not.” 

 

“I will be by the time I finish camp,” says Peter, pointing a finger at the camera. 

 

“Look, kid, it’s more of an … educational experience. It’ll look good on your resume, and all your little friends on the decathlon team are going. Ned, that walking can of hair gel, that girl you keep pretending not to have a crush on — ” 

 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Peter, turning beet red. “That isn’t … I mean, I don’t …” His eyes narrow. “Are you just trying to keep me off the streets?” 

 

Yes. That is precisely what Tony is doing. If not for his own sake, then because Happy needs the eight hours of education where Peter is (relatively) accounted for to keep some semblance of sanity. “I’m trying to make sure you have something other than ‘wears a unitard’  to put on your college applications.” 

 

“Who says I’m even  _ going _ to college?” says Peter, too cheerfully to be believed. 

 

“Please don’t make me talk your aunt off a ledge. Camp starts the Monday after your term ends.” 

 

“But — “

 

“Did I just hear a but?” 

 

“Um, yeah?” 

 

“Un-but. Case closed. Enjoy camp.” 

 

He hangs up on the kid then, but only because he anticipates he’ll get plenty of earfuls about it over the next few weeks anyway. After the incident in the warehouse, Tony started to make an effort to reach out to the kid at least once a week — which in turn somehow snowballed into daily calls and texts throughout the day, and Peter at about the same length from him that Pepper and Happy are at any given moment. 

 

It was the exact scenario Tony was so determined to avoid in the beginning, but a routine he’s come to strangely count on. He wakes up to some nonsense text from Peter about something he’s studying, he takes his breaks debating with the kid about the future of mutation science at lunch, he calls to check in on him in the afternoon and gets briefly filled in on whatever shenanigans Peter got into before they turn in for the night (sometimes Tony doesn’t answer so he can pretend he isn’t waiting up to make sure Peter gets home, but most of the time he is). A few times Tony even heads down to Queens to brave May’s cooking for dinner; more often, though, he has May and Peter for dinner himself, May and Pepper becoming much faster friends than Tony and Peter did. 

 

It’s not like Tony planned it. It just is a hell of a lot easier, he finds, to keep the kid in his orbit than to keep him at arm’s length. 

 

The problem being, of course, that the more Peter’s life bleeds into Tony’s, the more Spider-Man’s bleeds into Iron Man’s. Maybe it’s for the best that it’s happening this way — after all, the learning curve on becoming an Avenger was always bound to be a steep one — but Peter has been lending a hand more and more frequently when the Avengers deal with local threats, and even a few times outside of the city in the instances Tony was prepared with a Powerpoint slide of information on them for May’s approval. 

 

So Tony feels like he owes him this. Well, and May. And everyone else Tony has now unintentionally pulled into Team Let’s Make Sure Peter Survives To See His Eighteenth Birthday. The more time Peter spends with his friends and his studies, the less time any of them have to worry. 

 

Of course, Tony is rapidly learning that you can take the kid off the crime-fighting circuit for a few hours, but you can’t take the crime-fighting out of the kid. 

 

“Yo, Mr. Stark,” says Peter over the phone one afternoon, “have you been listening to the police scanner?” 

 

“Um, I’m gonna go ahead and say no,” says Tony. “Aren’t you supposed to be eating a Happy Meal and redefining the future of AI right now?” 

 

“Yeah, yeah, I can do that with a headphone in one ear.” 

 

“I’d prefer you not.” 

 

“There were a few unexplained explosions in Brooklyn, probably, like, trash can bombs, but I was just thinking that maybe — ”

 

“What did we say about cutting camp?”

 

“Well,  _ you _ said … um, not to. But Mr. Stark — ”

 

“Don’t worry about it, kid. I’m sure law enforcement has it handled. And if they don’t, they’ve got …”  _ Cap _ , he almost says, but it feels overly familiar given the circumstances. “Adequate reinforcements,” he finishes instead.

 

There’s a pause, and he knows Peter is deciding whether or not it’s worth pressing the point. “Okay,” he says after a moment, “but I’ll keep an eye on it — ”

 

“Or alternatively, you could — ”

 

“Wait, who ate my pizza?”

 

“Snooze you lose, Parker,” says a girl’s voice on the other line.

 

Tony takes this as his cue. “Talk to you later, kid,” he says, hanging up.

 

That should be the end of that, except that it never is. The kid has curbed his little habit of sneaking around behind Tony’s back, at least, but Tony doubts he won’t curb the habit of button pushing until they’re all dead. 

 

In an abundance of caution, Tony has every intention of tapping the police scanner just to check up on it, but an international call about a gala Pepper signed him up for interrupts him before he can. A half hour passes before he can extricate himself from the phone, and by then he’s forgotten all about the scanner conversation in the first place. 

 

He’s in his office when another call comes in, and he remembers said conversation with a jolt. It’s undoubtedly the kid following up — except that it isn’t. The call, of all people, is coming from Steve Rogers. 

 

Shit. 

 

For a moment Tony considers sending him to voicemail. It’s not that they’re on rocky terms; they aren’t on any terms at all, these days. They’ve only crossed paths a few times since Steve was cleared of his charges a few months ago and returned to Brooklyn, and all of those times there was far too much chaos for either of them to say anything beyond curt strategic suggestions and bare nods of acknowledgment when they were carried out. 

 

But this — an actual phone call, to Tony’s personal number no less — is a first. Enough of a first that he knows better than to ignore it. 

 

“Hey,” he says, his voice clipped. 

 

He doesn’t get much of a chance to decide how reserved he’s going to be with the other man, because the noise from the other end of the call slams into him like a brick wall. 

 

“You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t an emergency. I need as much help as I can get on the ground here — “

 

“Where?” he asks, already preparing to trigger an alert to the remaining Avengers. 

 

“Brooklyn,” says Steve, panting. “But listen — you can’t be here — “

 

“And why’s that?” 

 

“Whatever the hell this thing is, it’s frying any tech that comes near it. I had to leave the scene to call you. Your suit … I’m pretty sure it won’t work. I need backup, but I need people who are trained in hand-to-hand — ah!”

 

There’s a crash on the other end. Tony waits a few beats for Steve to get back on the line, already mentally running through a checklist of who he can send. 

 

“Give me as many details as you can.” 

 

“Some kind of massive … robotic … thing,” Steve pants. “Doesn’t look like it’s earth tech. Weapon resistant. So far all the only ones I’ve got on the ground are Sam and Spider-Man — ”

 

“ _ What? _ ” 

 

“ — but this thing is out of control, we can’t keep it contained — ”

 

“You called Spider-Man,” Tony accuses, through his teeth. 

 

“I put out a distress call to anyone I could — ”

 

“Bench him.  _ Now _ .” 

 

“What do you … No, we need him, this thing is — “

 

“He’s  _ fifteen _ . Get him the hell out or I swear to god, Rogers, I will — “

 

“He’s  _ what? _ Jesus Christ, he’s a  _ kid? _ ” 

 

“Where is he?” 

 

“I — I don’t have eyes on him right now, there’s too much — ”

 

There’s another crash, and the line goes dead.

 

“ _ Fuck _ .” 

 

He has to prioritize. He sends his own distress call to anyone he’s still on good terms with who may be in the area — Vision, Wanda, Natasha, even Clint. He sends out a drone to Brooklyn to get a bird’s eye view of the situation and test Steve’s little theory, and sure enough, it drops the moment it gets within viewing distance of the fumes of smoke in Red Hook. Knowing that it’s absolutely no use, he even instigates Baby Monitor protocol to get a visual through Peter’s mask, but it’s completely fried. 

 

Which means if Peter’s on the scene, he’s basically out there in a red and blue bed sheet.   

 

Tony blows out a breath. He can’t think about that right now, when there are much broader, more sweeping consequences to consider. 

 

The first is to figure out exactly what kind of technology this anomaly is capable of shorting out. Within a minute he has deployed ten different kinds of drones to the scene — nine out of ten of them fall out of the sky, but the one running on an experimental power source Tony had been tinkering with since the last time aliens left foreign tech on their soil miraculously doesn’t. 

 

Now the only trouble is figuring out how to supply power to his suit with it,  _ fast _ . 

 

He tries to keep an eye on the situation with the one active drone, but he can’t exactly afford to split his focus. It takes a maddening five minutes to outfit the suit with the new power source, and by then Tony doesn’t need the footage to know that something terrible is happening; he can hear the distant booms of commotion and see the smoke from Manhattan. 

 

By the time he’s taking off he can see some snippets of footage, interrupted by blasts of air every few seconds that knock the drone off course. He sees Wanda and Vision are already on the ground, both at odds with whatever it was that Steve was attempting to describe to him — he can’t tell if it is a machine or something biological, but it expands and contracts into different shapes with astonishing speed, and only seems to get smarter and more agile with every attempt made at it. 

 

Now that he knows what he’s getting into, he can finally address the scream in the back of his mind since Steve’s call dropped. 

 

“F.R.I.D.A.Y., locate Pe — Spider-Man.” 

 

The drone travels into the thick of the smog, but to either Tony’s relief or horror, finds him in a second. Tony doesn’t even need a clear visual to know the kid’s already in a bad way — the suit is torn in several places, and the gashes are bleeding profusely. Peter doesn’t seem to notice, though, doing exactly what Tony always told him to do in a situation like this — find civilians and get them the hell out of there. 

 

The problem is, Peter’s method of protecting civilians is by making himself as big of a target as possible. He watches the footage as Peter yells at the threat just before it targets a woman who’s running off, and ends up taking another blow straight to his midsection that knocks him back into a crumbling building with a crunch. 

 

Tony lands in the chaos a few seconds later, to find Peter, impossibly, staggering to his feet. 

 

“Kid — ” he starts, but then the sonar on his suit alerts him of an incoming threat. He turns and blasts back at the energy blast aimed for them just before it hits Peter, undoubtedly intended to finish him off. “Kid, you’re done.” 

 

Peter shakes his head, even as Tony has to physically grab him by the shoulders to get him to stand upright. 

 

“Do  _ not  _ make me take you out of here myself,” says Tony, “because it will be embarrassing, and — “

 

“Mr. Stark, no,” says Peter, shoving Tony’s hands away with surprising firmness. Tony is expecting his usual earnest, well-intentioned protests that border on whines, but Peter’s voice is unyielding. “This is bigger than me. I can’t leave. People will die.” 

 

_ You could die _ , Tony thinks, his chest tight with the thought.

 

He has to decide what to do here. There isn’t any time to waste; Wanda can only distract the thing for so long with her antics. 

 

Tony doesn’t decide so much as he lets go of Peter’s shoulders. Only a split second after it happens, and Tony watches with a sinking, mute kind of guilt as Peter tears back into the fray, does Tony realize that was a decision itself.

 

The kid is an Avenger now, for better or for worse. 

 

He hears Wanda cry out — apparently the crucial bit of time she just afforded them is over. He flies up to get better range and get in a few hits of his own, and miraculously, the combination of his thrusters and the suit’s new power source manage to do a bit of damage. He targets it a few times as it starts, just barely, to fold in on itself. 

 

Without consciously deciding to, he looks down and meets Steve’s eye. Steve nods at him. 

 

“Got any more where that came from?” Steve asks, so easily that it might be like old times — well, the brief window of old times when they were an actual team, and not at each other’s throats. 

 

“Yeah,” says Tony. “The drone I sent ahead. The same power source is in it. If this thing is as allergic to it as it seems — “

 

“On it,” says Steve, in one of those rare but ridiculous moments that, for all their uncompromisable differences, they seem to share a brain. 

 

Sure enough, within minutes Clint is firing arrows laced with the stuff, Nat’s bullets are soaked in it, and Steve is yelling out instructions to anyone without weaponry on clearing the scene and providing backup. Tony focuses on their efforts as the thing gets smaller and smaller, its metals groaning in an effort to keep firing back at them, getting more shapeless by the second. 

 

The more damage they inflict on it, though, the more dangerous it seems to get, firing insanely charged and silent shots at curved angles. Wanda gets her wits about her again just in time to pull one out of range from Sam in what would inevitably be a death blow, and Tony only manages to avoid them because of the heat-seeking radar in his suit. He knows he can’t afford even a moment of distraction right now, not with so much on the line, but he finds himself scanning the ground anyway. 

 

He finds what he’s looking for in an instant, and zeroes in on it to confirm what he already knows in the pit of his stomach — Peter, laying motionless on the ground next to a pile of rubble, his arm at a sickening angle, the mask ripped into so many shreds that he can see his pale, slack face underneath — 

 

Vision swoops in and scoops him up like a rag doll. 

 

“Is he — is he …?” 

 

He can’t even bring himself to finish the thought. There’s no way any human could hear him from this distance, but Vision turns to him and nods —  _ he’s alive —  _ and then flies Peter out of the thick of the chaos. 

 

Tony sucks in a breath and forces himself to focus. People are depending on him. But even as he aims and weaves and dodges and anticipates his teammates, all he can see is Peter’s lifeless face, all fifteen ridiculously short years of it set like a stone. 

 

He’ll never forgive himself for this. 

 

He continues to fire, the interface in his mask already adapting to locate the thing’s weak points. He barks out final instructions to the rest of the team as it finally starts to die, firing off more blasts than it has since its unhappy arrival, reminding Tony of some sick version of a Fourth of July fireworks finale.

 

And then, just when it’s almost over, it lets out a massive wave of energy that knocks Tony right out of the air. Before he even knows what’s happening he’s slamming against a building, the suit just barely kicking its propulsion back into gear and hovering before he hits the ground. He stumbles, the wind nearly knocked right out of him, the suit reporting critical damage — not that it matters anymore. Their enemy is imploding in on itself like a dying star. Their work here is done. 

 

Done, save for one more blast. Just as his Iron Man suit starts to fold back in on itself, the last pulse of energy cuts past Tony so cleanly and catches him so off guard that the next few moments seem like a dream — the crack, smash,  _ crunch _ of the building above him starting to crumble, the rush of red and blue coming from his left, the slam of a body against his that pushes him out of the way, and then black. 

 

He wakes a few minutes later to the sound of nearing sirens and crunching gravel and shouting. 

 

“Don’t worry, we’re going to get you out. Just keep talking, okay?” 

 

Tony knows that voice. He used to call it Steve’s “wounded bird” voice. And as the world comes back into unrelenting, brutal focus and his vision starts to clear, he is all at once painfully certain of who he is using it on, and entirely disbelieving of it at the same time. 

 

Tony stumbles to his feet, toward the rubble Steve, Natasha, Sam, and Clint are clustered around, the four of them heaving debris out of the way. 

 

“Where is he?” Tony’s voice is thick. He can’t see Peter anywhere, and distantly he knows what that must mean, the push and the rubble and the people pulling it out of the way, but no, no, no — 

 

“Tony, we’re gonna get him out,” says Natasha firmly. 

 

She usually has the kind of authority that can anchor a person, even in the throes of their own panic, but there is nothing anyone can say to him to talk him down from this. 

 

“Out of … out of — ” The understanding seems to crash not just in one wave, but in a staggering series of them. “He’s  _ under _ there?” 

 

They all but ignore him, the four of them focused on their task. 

 

“Talk to me, kid,” he hears Steve saying. 

 

The voice down below is weak, so quiet he can barely hear it, but so unmistakably Peter’s: “Talking,” he wheezes. “Um … saying things.” Like it’s a goddamn mic check and not a fucking  _ building _ dropped on him, Jesus, he shouldn’t even be alive — 

 

“Get him  _ out _ of there,” Tony yells, even though they’re all doing just that. He starts grabbing at debris himself, but fuck, his suit is beyond the repair of reengaging it and even in the physical shape he is, he can’t lift fucking  _ boulders _ of debris. “Where the hell are Vision and Wanda?” 

 

“Wanda collapsed, Vision flew off with her — ” 

 

“God  _ damn _ it.” 

 

Steve shoots Tony a warning look that for a brief second makes Tony so livid that he wants to punch the man in his star-spangled face, but the he understands its meaning — he can’t panic. He can’t do that to Peter. He has to be the calm one here. 

 

He summons another suit from the tower in the one second of clarity Steve’s reminder affords him, but it’s not enough. It’s not fast enough, not good enough, why the  _ fuck _ aren’t they getting him out any faster than — 

 

“Talk to him,” Natasha prompts him. They both know in his state and without his suit he can’t do much else. 

 

But Tony can’t talk to him. He can’t hear that strained, ridiculously trusting voice echoing down from below, can’t listen to the kid try to downplay the agony he must be in right now, knowing that it is completely and entirely  _ his fault _ . 

 

“ _ Talk _ to him. We have to keep him conscious.” 

 

Tony blinks, snapping himself out of it. “Peter?” he says. “Kid, can you hear me?” 

 

A beat. “Yeah,” he says hesitantly, like he knows he’s going to be in trouble. 

 

And fuck, will he ever be, by the time Tony’s through with him. He just has to hope the kid makes it out so he can kill him all over again. 

 

Tony opens his mouth to say something else, but it seems to hitch in his throat. He never imagined it coming to this. He was supposed to be there for Peter, not the other way around. He wants to go back in time, wants to shove Peter out of the way before Peter can shove him — he has no business being down there, under rubble meant for Tony, in a position Tony would trade with him in a heartbeat — 

 

“Tony,” Nat hisses. 

 

“Um — tell me, kid, what’s the, uh … what’s the dinner plan tonight? May cooking?” 

 

It takes Peter a beat to answer, and the beat is excruciating. “Yeah.” 

 

Steve and Sam heave another massive block off, but it’s not enough. They don’t even have eyes on him yet. Tony’s never felt more useless, more  _ helpless _ than he does right now. He knows if he even tries to get in on this that he’ll only get in the way. 

 

“Does she, uh, have a particular cuisine in mind, or is this another questionable Aunt May special?” 

 

“Um … roast beef?” Peter says, his voice muffled and wet. 

 

Another piece of rubble moved, and way too much to go. Tony squeezes his eyes shut. 

 

“Tell — tell me what you guys did at camp today.” 

 

Silence. 

 

“Peter?” 

 

He can hear the breathy, hiccupy sound from down below. “Um,” says Peter, the word cracking in his throat, “what’s, uh, the … ETA on the, um … getting out of here?” 

 

“Hold on, Peter,” says Steve firmly. It’s strange to Tony, hearing the kid’s name come out of someone else’s mouth. “A few more minutes, tops.” 

 

“Wanna hear a joke, kid?” asks Clint, as he hauls another piece off with Sam. Tony is embarrassed by how relieved he is — someone with actual experience with kids taking over for a second. Someone who can be the kind of calm for him that Tony certainly fucking can’t right now. 

 

“S-sure?” 

 

“How many ears does Spock have?” 

 

Peter wheezes. “Does e-everyone know I’m a nerd?” 

 

“Yep,” says Nat, without missing a beat. 

 

“A left ear, a right ear, and a final  _ front _ -ear,” says Clint, grunting as they shove another piece off. 

 

Peter lets out a strained laugh that abruptly tapers and turns into an unintentional gasp of pain just as Tony hears something shift below. They all do. Even Steve freezes, worried that the rubble might move out from under him again. 

 

“Kid? You still good down there?” asks Tony. 

 

He can hear the kid’s panicked breathing. “Yeah,” he lies. “Not the, uh — first time a building’s dropped on me.” 

 

“No rookie to this, then,” says Nat easily. 

 

“What the — when the hell did a  _ building _ fall on you?” Tony demands, forgetting himself yet again. 

 

“H-Homecoming.” 

 

Tony remembers the photos of the collapsed warehouse the cleanup crew took pictures of. He buries his face in his hands. Jesus Christ. 

 

“Did he saying  _ Homecoming? _ ” Nat hisses. “Tony, exactly how old is — ”

 

“He wasn’t supposed to  _ be _ here,” Tony growls. 

 

“And I thought  _ my _ school dance stories were bad,” says Steve, loudly, talking over them for Peter’s sake. 

 

Tony checks the skyline, waiting for the spare Iron Man suit he tried to summon. It isn’t coming. He already knows it. Whatever this beast was, its effect on technology within a certain radius of it didn’t die with it. 

 

Which is why, Tony realizes, the approaching sirens have stopped. Why the ambulances won’t be able to do any good. The moment Peter shoved Tony out of the way of that building he essentially signed his own death warrant. 

 

“Mr. Stark?” 

 

Tony already knows he doesn’t want to hear whatever’s on the other end of that question. 

 

“Yeah, kid?” he says anyway. 

 

“I’m sorry.” 

 

“No.” Tony knows what that sorry means, knows it better than anyone. “ _ No _ , you’re not sorry. Peter?” 

 

The silence is made all the more unbearable by the few seconds Tony had to anticipate it. 

 

“ _ Peter _ .” 

 

“Almost got him,” says Steve. 

 

“Kid, don’t you  _ fucking _ dare.” Tony’s shaking now, his whole body rigid, every part of him rejecting the reality of what’s happening. He should have known this would happen. Everything he touches, every person that he cares about — who  _ hasn’t _ he hurt? Who  _ hasn’t _ he let down? 

 

It was only a matter of time before someone paid the ultimate price. 

 

“I can see him,” Clint yells.

 

Tony’s stomach roils at the sight of Peter’s pale face down below, his eyes closed in this resigned, almost peaceful way, like he was all too willing to accept something that Tony cannot. The mask is in shreds, the suit probably not faring much better. 

 

“His legs are still trapped, get the — ”

 

“I’m on it!” 

 

“Hey, kid, can you hear me?” Natasha asks. She leans down, touching Peter’s face with a gentleness that splinters some part of him he is actively trying to ignore. 

 

“Jesus, he’s young,” Sam mutters. “Tony, what were you — ”

 

“Just  _ get him out! _ ” Tony roars, even though he knows they’re all doing their best to do just that. 

 

They finally get the last piece off of him, and Tony holds his breath, waiting for it — for that pluck, for that resilience, for Peter to make him feel ridiculous for his overblown worry by blinking in surprise or twitching awake and offering a weak version of one of those lopsided, over eager smiles of his. 

 

But Peter is unnaturally still, so unmoving that he doesn’t look anything like himself. So unmoving that he looks … 

 

No. No, no, no — 

 

He doesn’t realize he’s muttering the words out loud until Steve has leaned down and hoisted Peter out of the rubble, the kid entirely slack in his arms. Wordlessly, Steve carries him down and lays him out on the cement, putting two fingers up to Peter’s neck. 

 

“I can’t find a pulse.” 

 

“Move,” says Tony, and Steve does, immediately.  

 

He tries not to look at the gash that rained blood down Peter’s face, not to look at his mangled arm or the burns that seared through his suit. He presses down on the kid’s chest and starts compressions, feeling like he is almost outside of his own body, watching this nightmare happen to someone else. 

 

“Come on, Peter,” he mutters. “ _ Come on _ .” 

 

This can’t be it. This can’t be how it ends. Not for Peter, who for all of his antics has always seemed as invincible as he seems to think he is — not for Peter, who could talk a wall off about anything and has such ridiculous, boundless potential — not for Peter, who is one of the last good and untainted people in this fucked up world they’re fighting in, after all Tony has done to try and keep it that way. 

 

Not enough. He didn’t do enough. And this isn’t  _ near _ enough time. 

 

The sirens start back up again. The thing’s effect on tech must be finally wearing off. 

 

“Get an ambulance over here,  _ now _ .” 

 

Steve nods and starts running without a word. It’s Natasha who puts a tentative hand on his shoulder and says, her voice low and careful, “Tony …” 

 

He shakes her hand off. “No.” 

 

“Tony, he’s — ”

 

“ _ No _ . He’s not going to die out here. I swear to fucking  _ god _ , Natasha, he’s — ”

 

A spark. Peter’s suit flickers back to life. 

 

Tony slams down on the center of it, remembering when he installed this feature thinking that there was no world in which he’d have to use it — he is more grateful than ever when the built in defibrillator kicks to life and Peter’s body flinches with violence. 

 

It’s not enough.  _ Fuck _ . How can it not be enough? 

 

He slams it again, and Jesus, it’s hard to watch. He tells himself he has to, but even the idea of putting the kid through any more trauma than he’s already has seems unthinkable to him. When the shock rips through his body again and nothing happens, there is a brief, piercing moment where Tony wonders if maybe Natasha is right. 

 

He can’t even let himself fathom it. Even standing on the edge of trying to accept it is too dark, too deep — he knows he’ll never make it out of the other side. 

 

“Please,” he says, one stupid, futile, ridiculous bargain with the universe — he brings his hand down on it one more time, watching the current pulse through Peter’s skinny frame, and then — 

 

And then the impossible happens. Peter’s whole body jerks a second time, his chest quivers, and he  _ breathes _ . 

 

It is the ugliest and most beautiful sound that Tony has ever heard. 

 

“ _ Christ _ ,” he mutters, his hand still braced on Peter’s chest, so weak with relief that he almost lays down on the concrete right with him. 

 

Peter’s eyes flutter open for just the briefest moment, and Natasha is there crouching beside the kid, her hands on his forehead in a gesture that Tony thinks at first is meant to soothe but he realizes in an instant is meant to brace him. Sure enough, a moment later Peter is gasping, his eyes rolling back into his head — ”You’re okay, kid, we’ve got you,” says Clint, as Tony just sits there trying to hear past the roar in his ears, the slamming of his own heart. 

 

A moment later they scoop him up and take him to an ambulance to stabilize him, Tony half-stumbling as he follows, refusing to let anyone pull him out of the way. As they’re loading him into the helicopter back to the tower, he collects just enough of himself to call Happy and tell him to call May to meet them there. 

 

“What should I tell her?” Happy asks. 

 

Tony closes his eyes. “To hurry.” 

 

Happy doesn’t ask anymore questions after that. 

 

They don’t let Tony close enough to Peter on the helicopter to do anything but stand there and worry, not even able to get a clear look at him over the medical personnel surrounding him. Only once they unload does Tony get a clear view of him, looking absurdly small with an oxygen mask strapped to his face and his eyes still closed. They pull Peter into a room for surgery and say that’s as far as Tony is allowed to go, and only then, standing outside the door, does the final piece holding him together start to crack — his eyes are stinging, his hands shaking, every part of him wrung with fear and regret. 

 

He doesn’t move from that spot, even when he sees May Parker tearing down the hall, murder in her eyes. 

 

“What the  _ hell _ happened?” she demands. 

 

Tony opens his mouth and nothing comes out. 

 

“Where is he?” May’s face is mottled and red and streaked with tears, but it does nothing to dull the fury in her voice. She reaches out and shoves him. “Where the  _ hell _ is my kid?” 

 

“Surgery,” is all he can manage. 

 

May follows his eyes to the door, and she cups her face in her hands, holding back tears, and says, “How bad is it?” 

 

Tony doesn’t answer fast enough, and it’s all the answer she needs. 

 

She lets out an angry, throaty sob. “Where the hell were you?” she demands. “You dragged him into this mess. Where the hell  _ were _ you?” 

 

“I couldn’t stop him,” says Tony.

 

May shakes her head. “You  _ didn’t _ stop him.” 

 

Tony knows the moment they leave her mouth that those words are going to stick with him for a long, long time. 

 

It takes them eight hours to finish with Peter. Eight hours of Tony and May sitting outside the door in white-knuckled silence, only occasionally interrupted by Happy — the team, apparently, is downstairs and waiting to hear updates that Tony can’t give.

 

“I know it’s not your fault,” says May after the first few hours, her voice resigned, exhausted. “I know he’s safer than he would have been because of you.” 

 

Tony doesn’t know what to say. None of it matters, really, if Peter can still end up in a situation like this. 

 

When someone comes out of the room and says that Peter’s stable and awake, May leaps up to her feet with a clatter, only pausing briefly at the door to see if Tony is following. Tony nods at her to go; he has no right. May needs her moment alone with him, without the man who put him in this position in the first place. 

 

He watches through the window on the door, an almost crippling wave of relief flooding through him as he sees Peter awake and sitting up, his face bruised and stitched, his arm and his chest wrapped up, but otherwise very much whole and alive. 

 

May’s tears are gone; she has the same innate calm for Peter’s sake that Tony couldn’t summon. She perches herself on the side of Peter’s bed and Peter gives her this weak attempt at a smile. She shakes her head at him, murmurs something in his ear and presses him into her. Peter lasts maybe a second more before his eyes well with tears, and it only takes an instant for him to dissolve into hiccuping, little kid sobs, like he has been holding it in for hours, like he’s been holding it in for months. 

 

Tony tears his eyes away and leaves the hall. 

 

A day passes. The rest of the Avengers come and go, and Tony senses, even in the numb of the aftermath, that something has shifted — that this battle, painful as it was, was the reminder they needed of what it felt like to be a team in the first place. If not for their own sakes, then for the sake of Peter, and for whoever else gets roped into this down the line; he knows that Peter will hardly be the last of them, even if his heart is heavy with it. 

 

May never leaves Peter’s side, save for the second day, when she leaves so Peter can talk to Ned. She finds Tony lurking in his office within a minute. 

 

“He wants to see you,” she says pointedly. 

 

Tony nods. 

 

“What’s the holdup?” 

 

He turns to face her. Judging by the look on her face, the guilt must be raw on his.

 

“He thinks you’re mad at him,” she says, the hardness gone from her voice. 

 

“No,” says Tony. “Just mad at myself.” 

 

He doesn’t sleep for two days. Nothing can occupy his thoughts long enough. He visits when he knows Peter will be asleep, or when they put him under again to re-break his arm after the bone starts growing the wrong way. In the end, he doesn’t come to Peter. Peter comes to him. 

 

“What the — you shouldn’t be up, kid,” says Tony, standing up from the couch with a start as soon as he realizes the shadow in the doorway belongs to Peter. 

 

Peter hovers there, gnawing on the inside of his lip. “Yeah, well, I ran out of movies to watch,” he says. 

 

Tony raises his eyebrows at him and Peter juts his chin out slightly, like he’s daring Tony to send him back. He knows the kid can lift a car over his head, but even this small act of defiance is slightly reminiscent of a puppy straining against a leash. 

 

Tony jerks his head toward the spot next to him on the couch, and Peter limps over to it and sits down. For a few moments neither of them speak, staring straight ahead at the blank television screen. 

 

“You could’ve  _ died _ ,” Tony blurts.  

 

Peter is evidently prepared for this argument. “But I didn’t.” 

 

Tony doesn’t mean to raise his voice — does he ever, with Peter? — but he does before he can stop himself. “You didn’t  _ know _ that.” 

 

Peter swallows nervously. “But I knew you would,” he says. “I couldn’t let it happen.” 

 

Tony stares down at his hands, his head suddenly feeling impossibly heavy. “Jesus, kid,” he mutters. “I’m supposed to be the one protecting you.” 

 

“And you have,” says Peter. “You do. You’re like a …” 

 

It hovers there in the quiet, even if Peter doesn’t say it. Tony knows he can’t. They’ve both lost too many people; it would seem like daring the universe to say it out loud. 

 

Instead Tony wraps an arm around Peter’s good shoulder and squeezes. “You scared the shit out of me, kid,” he says, as Peter leans his head on his shoulder. “Don’t you  _ ever _ pull a stunt like that again. Understand?” 

 

Peter doesn’t answer. He may be new to this, but he already knows the score — there are no promises in their line of work. 

 

Tony wishes he could promise things anyway. He wishes he could promise May that he can keep Peter safe. He wishes he could promise Peter that he’ll always be here. He wishes he could promise a future where none of this kind of bullshit happens anymore, a world where there are no Avengers because they simply aren’t needed. 

 

He can’t promise it, but he can do the next best thing — he can try. And he will, every day for the rest of his damn life. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELP, all things must end. Angsty ones, especially. 
> 
> First and foremost, thank you all so much for reading this. It's been a stressful as all hell last month, and to get to see this movie and be a part of this insanely beautiful fandom again at the end of it has been The Cure To All The Things. I am on top of the moon at your responses to this; I hope that I will be able to write more in this vein, because it's my new drug. 
> 
> Secondly, I have a Tumblr, but my real person identity is on it, and, well, I can't compromise it (#DontTellAuntMay). I made a side blog under the username upcamethesun (it's an itsy-bitsy spider reference, murder me), so please feel free to hit me up with prompts there, if you have any. (I'm pretty sure you can do that, right? I am so bad at technology. Please don't look me in the eye.) 
> 
> Thirdly, if you wanna fuck yourself right up today, check out the rumors about Spider-Man in Infinity War, courtesy of the D23 sneak peek of the trailer ... I have to say, I wrote this chapter BEFORE the media coverage rolled in, so the said "I'm sorry" bit on my part and theirs was just a (sad, angsty, ridiculous) coincidence. 
> 
> Thank you all so much again. This has been the best part of my whole human year.


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